Considered as one of the big boys in the optical storage industry together with the likes of Plextor and LITE-ON, RICOH was also the first manufacturer to offer an alternative to Sanyo's BURN-Proof technology with their JustLink buffer-underrun protection. While its competitors have already off-loaded the 40x-writing drives from their inventory and some have even begun shipping their 48x-writing CD-RW drives, RICOH only announced their 40x-writing burner a couple of weeks ago.

Given their patterns so far, it does look like the major Japanese OEM vendors (including RICOH, Plextor, SANYO and Yamaha) have no interest in jumping into the CD-RW writing-speed war, with 40x-writing drives being the fastest burners in their inventory so far at press time. Which isn't a bad thing actually, since most of us know that burners made by these Japanese vendors have one of the best writing qualities around. Of course, we can mention Yamaha's support for 44x-writing in their upcoming CRW-F1 series but that is another story (which we will cover in a separate article soon).

The MP7400A is the direct successor to the MP7320A and is rated at 40x-writing, 10x-rewriting and 40x-reading. The evaluation unit we received from Taiwan did not come in its retail packaging. Just the drive together with a couple of CD-R/RW media. No cables, no software, nothing else. So let's just take a look at the specifications of the drive.